Why Your Hands Feel Numb or Tingle
Have you ever woken up with numb, tingling hands or felt an unexplained sensation of pins and needles throughout the day? While occasional tingling may not be a cause for concern, persistent numbness often points to an underlying issue with the nerves. Understanding what’s causing these sensations is the first step toward finding relief.
I’m Lauren Masi, a Doctor of Physical Therapy and Board Certified Orthopedic Clinical Specialist. I’m also the owner and Clinical Services Director of Bay Area Physical Therapy and Lafayette Physical Therapy. Today, we’re going to talk about why hands feel numb or tingle.
Numbness or Tingling in the Hands Can Have Many Causes
Numbness or tingling in the hands can have many different causes or origins; but one thing that we always know is that it’s coming from a nerve. Somewhere, a nerve is getting unhappy. It might be getting compressed from inflammation in an area, or from an actionable, tangible source. Here are two common causes:
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
People commonly think of any numbness and tingling in the hand as being due to carpal tunnel syndrome. The carpal tunnel is an area in the wrist where there’s space for tendons, ligaments, and nerves to pass through from your arm into your hand. That area is very narrow.
If any of those tendons get inflamed or thickened, that area can get compressed which can lead to numbness and tingling. Or, if the median nerve (which helps you move your forearm and feel your fingers and hands) gets irritated, you will feel symptoms down into your hand over time. Sometimes, you might even start to feel numbness or tingling up into the forearm a little bit.
Irritation of Other Nerves
However, carpal tunnel is not the only thing that can cause numbness and tingling in your hand. There’s many other nerves that go into the hand. The next most commonly injured one is the ulnar nerve, which runs along the pinky side of your wrist.
Irritation of the ulnar nerve is noticed most in people who are cyclists who might be leaning on their hands a lot. This can cause symptoms like numbness and tingling into the pinky finger or ring finger.
Where We Look for the Cause of Numbness or Tingling
It’s one of our jobs as a physical therapist to figure out where your symptoms are coming from. As a lay person, sometimes you think it has to be just in the hand. We’ve learned that we have to look farther up the chain, because sometimes our bodies can trick us.
Other areas that can cause numbness and tingling in the hand can be the elbow, the neck, and the chest. We’re going to help work through all the different tissues, different joints, and different movements to see if we can get to the origin of the pain.
Physical Therapists Can Do Nerve Conduction Testing to Find the Source of Your Symptoms
We also can do nerve conduction testing to help find the source of your symptoms. This is a type of testing where we can measure and assess the timing and the speed with which nerve signals travel down your arm. We can look at it in different segments and really isolate where that compression might be coming from so that we have more information to effectively and efficiently treat the pain local to where the problem is.
During a second portion of nerve conduction testing, we look at the muscles to see how the nerves are innervating different muscles and determine if your weakness is due to a compressed nerve. And if we do find a slowing or a compression of the nerves, it is crucial that you seek out a medical provider to see what your options are for treatment.
Another diagnostic test that we offer is musculoskeletal ultrasound. It’s super cool, just like the ultrasound that you might’ve had if you’ve had a baby. We can look at the nerves in your hands and wrists and everywhere in your body, and sometimes we actually can see where that nerve is inflamed or narrowed and compressed.
When Should You See a Physical Therapist for Numbness or Tingling in Your Hands?
One thing that I often tell my patients is that, if you start to feel numbness and tingling and it’s not getting better within a couple of days, you should see a physical therapist. Nerves are the easiest to irritate tissue in the body and take the longest to heal. If you keep a compressed nerve compressed for too long, you could end up with permanent nerve damage that is not reversible.
We certainly want to help you on the road to figuring out why your hands are feeling numb and tingling, and we can do that through nerve conduction testing. All of our diagnostic tools can help you get more information to take back to your doctor to see what your options for treatment are. This is valuable information that will let you know whether we can keep it conservative with physical therapy care, or if there’s a compressed nerve that would be best handled through surgery.
Reach Out to Bay Area Physical Therapy for Expert Support
If you need some help figuring out where your numbness and tingling is coming from in your hands, please reach out to Bay Area Physical Therapy today. And for more information, please reference some of our other vlogs on diagnostics, carpal tunnel, and finding the cause of pain.